How much are you paying for financial advice?

If you don’t already know how much you pay for the financial advice you receive, now is the time to find out.

As of 2017, Canadian investment dealers are sending two new personalized reports to each of their clients once per year. One report provides new information about how well your investments performed. The other tells you how much your dealer (the company where your advisor is registered) was paid for the services it provided on your account over the past year.

The services provided by dealers could include understanding and reviewing your financial situation, helping you define your goals, advising and coaching you on different types of investments, buying and selling units of a fund for you and keeping detailed records of your account. Ask your advisor to tell you about the services that their firm provides and make sure you are getting the most out of the relationship.

Understanding how much your dealer was paid is an important aspect of understanding your investments. The industry is now working to improve the cost report so that it will eventually provide you with the total costs of investing, in dollars and cents, for your account. Watch for this change down the road.